I'll Be Your Blue Sky (Love Walked In #3)(44)

Margaret. Roan. Cont chk. Auburn hair, pale, skinny inside her big wool coat, freckles like sprinkled nutmeg across her nose.

Kitty. Farm. Bns bck, arms. I. Bergman cheekbones, husky laugh, nightmares.

Alice. Port. Br rbs, clav. Cont, abr face. Sang lullabies, voice like an angel, oval nails. Carolyn. Dimples, topknot. Johnny. Drove a toy truck over the floors and up the walls.

Janet. Hamp. Br tooth, cont face. Knitted while she talked, the needles clicking, dove-gray bobbed hair, sweater with acorn-shaped buttons. Peggy. Sixteen, pointed chin, ballerina posture down to her turned-out feet, fierce brown eyes that bode well for her future.

Carol Joan Dotty Ginger Linda Mary Joyce . . .

Rich NNews Char Rich Lou Fred Lynch Norf . . .

Abr chk Cont arms Br rad Cont nck Cont trnk Eardr rup . . .

Swan’s neck blue-black hair talks with hands swore a blue streak tall dry humor red lipstick yellow braids Raggedy Ann doll math homework chewed nails green eyes penciled eyebrows loves movies loves baseball spoke in whispers . . .

While much of what I read was code-like, inscrutable, what I could understand was so vivid it seemed to breathe. I found myself turning the pages gently, as if they were precious, as if they might dissolve under my fingertips, causing all the people in them to be lost. The daylight ledger had been interesting, but the shadow ledger made me feel that I was discovering something momentous, like the guy who found King Tut’s tomb; one minute you’re poking around in some rubble, and the next, you’re opening a door to a roomful of gold. A few times, in the middle of reading, I felt so excited that I had to go out and walk around in the backyard. Distracted by wonder and confusion, it’s a miracle I didn’t step off the edge and fall straight into the canal.

My first theory was that the shadow ledger was a more personal version of the daylight one, Edith’s private take on the guests, an aside, like notes jotted down in the margins of a book. So when I’d finished reading the shadow ledger through once, I opened both ledgers and compared the two, entry by entry, date by date. But it didn’t take long for that first theory to crash and burn because, for one thing, the daylight ledger began more than a year before Edith made the shadow ledger’s first entry, and after that, while sometimes the dates matched up, the names never did.

It was as if Edith ran two guesthouses, one for people with full names and houses on specific streets in specific towns that they’d go home to, and another one for ghosts, mostly female ghosts. Only they weren’t ghosts. Ghosts didn’t have fierce eyes or freckles; they didn’t love baseball or sing lullabies. I thought of Edith’s photographs, how one, small, chosen fragment of Joseph could evoke a whole man and a world of love between the photographer and her subject. In Edith’s hands, the shadow ledger guests, despite being nameless and rootless, apparently untethered to the ordinary world, became exquisitely human. And what I believed, what seemed clear to me, was that Edith loved them, too, although not the way she loved Joseph, of course. What I kept picturing was Miss Clavel from the children’s book Madeline: Edith, doing her duty, watching over, keeping track, not turning off the light until everyone was safe.

*

I called Dev.

I almost didn’t because even though I’d maintained my cool through the roller-coaster ride of my dead-of-night conversation with Zach, the next day, I kept coming back to the part where he’d accused me of rebounding with my high school sweetheart. That accusation hit home, just a bit, not because I wanted to rebound with Dev or with anyone—God knows I felt as wrung out and done with romance as I ever had and, anyway, when it came to romance, Dev was definitely and forever off the table—but because what had started the day I’d sat at that enormous, glossy conference table with the equally enormous, glossy (in spirit anyway) Eloisa Dunne and learned that Edith had given me a house, was an adventure. A true blue, strange, astonishing, bona fide adventure. And the person who’d always had adventures with me, my longtime partner in crime (or what passed for crime for two hopelessly goody-two-shoes kids) was Dev Tremain.

I hadn’t actually spoken to him since the wedding that wasn’t. He’d followed up his wedding-cake-devouring photo with a text that simply read, I’m here if you need, you know, wisdom or whatever. And by whatever, I mean anything. But you knew that already, and then he proceeded, apart from the occasional goofball text, to keep his distance, Dev having always been a person who got, without being told, when a person needed a little space. The night of the day I found out that Edith left me her house, when I was still too stunned to talk about it with anyone apart from my mom, who’d been with me when I got the news, Dev sent a text that said: So get this: this guy I met last week in the sandwich line at Wawa? He just bequeathed me an island. A small one but still: A WHOLE ISLAND. I laughed, out loud no less, and texted back: Always with the one-upsmanship. To which he responded: Wait. Are you saying you inherited something (far less impressive than an island) today, too???

Even though I can see how some people wouldn’t like it (he was my ex-boyfriend after all), I’d always found it comforting, Dev’s and my being part of the same information pipeline, his knowing things about me without my having to tell him. Even though we hadn’t talked about it, I was sure he knew I was staying at Edith’s house, just like I knew he was working in a lab at UPenn for the summer, ate lunch at a North Philly falafel place every single weekday, and on Sunday afternoons, played on a men’s basketball team that included his former high school biology teacher and his best friend (and my best friend’s kind-of-but-not-really-at-least-not-yet boyfriend), Aidan. Neither of us found it weird, and neither of us ever did much with the information we had. We just knew stuff about each other’s lives. It was how it was, how it had always been.